Industry News from Conferencing

[November 12, 2012]

TalkTalk Speaks Out About ATEME Video Quality

PARIS --(Business Wire)--

The newly launched UK TalkTalk TV service delivering live multicast and
on demand content via the recently released YouView connected TV set top
box is the first major TV service to exploit the latest high performance
video compression technology from ATEME. TalkTalk selected ATEME's TITAN
platform for the YouView based service after being highly impressed by
the picture quality delivered by the underlying software encoder called
EAVC4, according to its Director of TV technology Brian Paxton.

TITAN transcoding platform adopted by TalkTalk (Photo: Business Wire)

"We needed to upgrade our current broadcast head end to allow us to
expand our channel line-up, and looked at all the main encoding
vendors," said Paxton. "After evaluating these options we selected ATEME
as the impressive picture quality achieved by the new ATEME EAVC4
technology exceeded that of the other vendors."

TalkTalk has been using ATEME products since 2007, starting with offline
encoders for preparing movie and other on demand contet. "Even then we
were impressed by the quality of the product," said Paxton. But now
ATEME has opened up an even bigger gap over its rivals with the EAVC4
compression engine, which enables operators to optimize video content
for specific screen sizes and available bandwidths. EAVC4 represents a
major leap forward in performance, with drastic speed improvements for
all video quality (VQ) settings, and the ability either to encode faster
at the current VQ level, or to significantly increase VQ while
maintaining the current encoding speed.

The EAVC4 video encoding architecture exploits a combination of
multi-processor and multi-core 64-bit architecture, and multi-threading
from slice level up through macro block level, to achieve its efficiency
gains. This has involved a complete redesign by ATEME, resulting in up
to 20% bandwidth gains for progressive and interlaced content based on
objective measures, and even higher gains based on visual perception.

For TalkTalk these capabilities are essential as it campaigns to become
one of the UK's major pay TV providers in the multiscreen era,
leveraging its extensive content catalogue to target its existing base
of 4 million broadband customers. The TV service is free to these
existing broadband customers after payment of a £50 ($80) installation
fee for the YouView set top box, and will provide access to over 100
broadcast channels, including free to air programming from the BBC, ITV
and many others, as well as extra paid premium channels such as Sky
Sports.

About ATEME

ATEME is a world leading provider of MPEG-4 / H.264 and MPEG-2 bandwidth
efficient compression technology. ATEME encoding solutions are deployed
widely for broadcast contribution links, distribution, multi-screen live
streaming, OTT and VOD applications. Find out more on ATEME's technology
and the EAVC4 codec on http://www.ateme.com/White-papers.